The Mississippi River Great Flood of 1927

September 18, 2017 
/ Contributed By: Malik Simba

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Flooded Greenville

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The Mississippi River โ€œGreat Flood of 1927โ€ inundated large areas in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. However, it was in Mississippi where the embankments overflowed, drowning hundreds, perhaps a thousand people, and became one of the largest natural disasters in US history in terms of loss of life.

The flood also starkly revealed the wide โ€œdelta of Black peonageโ€ or the โ€œnewโ€ slavery that controlled the lives of slaves freed in 1865 and their descendants sixty-two years after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. The flood showed that the shadow of the plantation still loomed large, as little had changed in the Mississippi Delta since emancipation. Most blacks in the region still resided on plantations as sharecroppers and tenant farmers while many others were forced into coerced labor. In fact, in the aftermath of the flood, local law-enforcement authorities arrested thousands of black men, caged them in โ€œpens,โ€ and released them to white planters in need of rebuilding their businesses. The US Justice Department failed to aggressively pursue statutory violations of the Anti-Peonage Act of 1867, interceding reluctantly and sporadically in the region.

The Justice Departmentโ€™s seeming indifference mirrored that of other federal agencies to blacks, who suffered disproportionately because of the flood. Walter White, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) returned to Association headquarters in New York City, New York from the Mississippi Delta and wrote a scorching review of the failure of federal Jim Crow relief efforts in the flood areas. White revealed the use of federal troops in holding black โ€œpeonsโ€ in โ€œconcentration campsโ€ until their planter employers could claim them.

This report and other confirming newspaper accounts prompted Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was in charge of relief, to appoint a โ€œColored Advisory Committeeโ€ to investigate the NAACPโ€™s complaints. Hooverโ€™s committee was chaired by Tuskegee Institute president Robert Russa Moton, with eleven other Tuskegeeans as committee members. Hoover hoped that a benign report from the conservative Washington camp would discredit the harsh criticism from the NAACP. Attempting to play both sides against the middle, Moton urged Hoover to use this โ€œgrave natural disaster โ€œto create โ€œa sense of freedom and hopeโ€ for blacks in the Delta. Refusing to support Whiteโ€™s earlier findings, Moton hoped that this noncritical approach would influence Hooverโ€™s relief efforts in a positive manner. However, Motonโ€™s committeeโ€™s report lay dormant on Hooverโ€™s desk for months.

Between January and March 1928, The Crisis (NAACPโ€™s official magazine) ran a series of exposes on the despair, starvation, and exploitation of black labor in the delta. These essays revealed to a national readership that peonage (debt-slavery) bolstered by the Southern convict-lease system still dominated the lives of the vast majority of African Americans in the region.

About the Author

Author Profile

Malik Simba received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota. He has held professorships in the departments of history at State University of New York at Binghamton and Clarion University in Pennsylvania. Presently, he is a senior professor and past chair of the History Department (2000-2003) at California State University-Fresno in California. Dr. Simba was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1979, 1987, and 1990. He serves on the Board of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program at California State University-Fresno.

Dr. Simba is the author of Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism: From the Colonial Background through the Ascendancy of Barack Obama and the Dilemma of Black Lives Matter (4th edition, 2019). He has contributed numerous entries in the Encyclopedia of African History, Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois Encyclopedia, Malcolm X Encyclopedia, African American Encyclopedia, and the Historical Dictionary of Civil Rights. Additionally, Dr. Simba has published the definitive analysis of race and law using critical legal theory in his โ€œGong Lum v. Rice: The Convergence of Law, Race, and Ethnicityโ€ in American Mosaic. His essay, โ€œJoel Augustus Rogers: Negro Historians in History, Time, and Space,โ€ appeared in Afro-American in New York Life and History 30:2 (July 2006) as part of a Special Issue: โ€œStreet Scholars and Stepladder Radicals-A Harlem Tradition,โ€ Guest Editor, Ralph L. Crowder. The essays on Rogers contributes to our knowledge of street scholars or historians without portfolios. Dr. Simbaโ€™s other published works include book reviews in the Chicago Tribune, Focus on Law Studies, and the Journal of Southwest Georgia History.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Simba, M. (2017, September 18). The Mississippi River Great Flood of 1927. BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/mississippi-river-great-flood-1927/

Source of the Author's Information:

Pete Daniels, Deepโ€™n As It Comes: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (1977; repr., Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996); William H. Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Malik Simba, Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism: From the Colonial Background through the Ascendancy of Barack Obama and the Dilemma of Black Lives Matter (Dubuque, IA: Kendell Hunt, 2017); and Robyn Spencer, โ€œContested Terrain: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and the Struggle to Control Black Labor,โ€ Journal of Negro History 79 (January 1994): 170โ€“81.

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